Latin-1

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Latin-1 (or more formally, ISO-8859-1) is a character encoding standard. It defines a set of characters used for major western European languages.

The Distributed Proofreaders website used Latin-1 for processing all of its books, from its creation until May 19th, 2020. After that, it changed to the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode.


But What Is Latin-1?

Latin-1 is two sets of letters.

First are all the ASCII characters. If your computer was made in an English-speaking country, these are probably the letters you see right on your keyboard. You can type them without resorting to popups or special keyboard layouts.

Here is the second set:

¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª « ¬ - ® ¯
° ± ² ³ ´ µ · ¸ ¹ º » ¼ ½ ¾ ¿
À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï
Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß
à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï
ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ÷ ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ

Note especially:

The first character in that second set is the non-breaking space. It is not used in proofing, but can be used in post-processing.

-
"Soft" or "invisible" hyphen. Never used in proofing, and rare in post-processing. It is basically the same as the "­" character in HTML.
º ª
Masculine and feminine ordinals. Don't use these in proofing unless the Project Comments say to. Normally replaced by ^o and ^a.
¼ ½ ¾
"Vulgar fractions". Don't use these in proofing unless the Project Comments say to. Normally replaced by 1/4, 1/2, 3/4.
×
Multiplication sign. The Project Comments should say whether to use this instead of the letter x.

Letters

Most Western European languages can be written in Latin-1. You've got:

acute accent
á é í ó ú ý Á É Í Ó Ú Ý
grave accent
à è ì ò ù À È Ì Ò Ù
circumflex accent
â ê î ô û Â Ê Î Ô Û
umlaut or dieresis
ä ë ï ö ü Ä Ë Ï Ö Ü
tilde
ã õ ñ Ã Õ Ñ
extra letters
ç Ç æ Æ ø Ø å Å ð Ð þ Þ


More information can be found at Wikipedia.

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